"Joe Meek ... the most important British musician of the Sixties."

"[H]e was a backroom boffin who revolutionized sound, devising new recording techniques and crafting an endless flow of gloriously deranged experimental pop that gave him the right to regard himself as the true creator of the records he worked on. Telstar, by The Tornadoes, is still Meek's best-known single. It was the first record by a British act to reach the top of the American pop charts and, rather unexpectedly, was chosen by Margaret Thatcher as one of her Desert Island Discs. An ode to the dawn of the space age and to what Harold Wilson later called the 'white heat of technology', it's a dizzyingly exciting instrumental full of strange, unclassifiable effects: the rocket-launch sound at the beginning is said to be a toilet flushing in reverse; the sounds evoking radio signals were apparently produced by running a pencil around the rim of an ashtray."